Random thoughts, cheap shots, bon mots

[With apologies to the San Francisco Chronicle’s Scott Ostler, who often starts his sports columns this way]

Someone who gets it: As those of you readers outside my immediate family who read my last posting, I roasted Information Week’s Alexander Wolfe for bemoaning the tragic (in his eyes) plethora of distro choices in the GNU/Linux universe. Along comes Linux Today Managing Editor Brian Proffitt with a column that spells out Wolfe’s folly in detail. So now I’m in the enviable position of toasting Brian for the column — salud! — and thanks.

Europe gets it, too: Business Week reports that a high court adviser in the EU has decided that ISPs are not required to reveal information to authorities when users are suspected of music piracy. Hopefully, this will spell doom — in large, italicized capital letters — for the efforts by IFPI, the global RIAA, to litigate against European P2P users. Now if we can only get justices that enlightened on this side of the Atlantic . . . . Get the details here.

Nice doggie: Despite the brouhaha a couple of weeks ago in Distrowatch over Puppy, it bears mentioning that Puppy Linux has released version 2.17, and this latest one comes with CUPS, according to Puppy top dog Barry Kauler. This version will run on older machines — that’s a good thing for those of us who are not on the cutting edge of the latest technology (choosing to spend our money on things like rent, feeding the family other of life’s so-called priorities) — and it immediately goes on my list of distros to try. “More on the story,” as we say at Open Source and Free Software Reporter, from Linux.com here.

[I have just the machine for it: An old Dell Optiplex GXa desktop that the Santa Cruz Sentinel, my employer, gave to me rather than dumping it. Currently it’s running Mepis AntiX, after a short stint with Linux Mint 3.0 Xfce — both GREAT — but I think I’ll throw this Puppy a stick. More on this in a later blog posting.]

Rearranging the deck chairs: My absence from this blog for a few days (tops) comes courtesy of rearranging my living room to accommodate much of the hardware that I’ve accumulated/garnered/been entrusted with, etc. I have the solution of putting three machines each in two corners of the living room and must now do the remodeling. All of which is to say that visitors will no longer have two iMacs and a monitor staring them in the face when they sit down on the couch.

Last, and certainly not least . . . the Italian Open Source Web site One Open Source runs a very interesting Q-and-A interview with Linus Torvalds in which Linus — who’s supposed to be rabidly anti-GPLv3 (to hear some tell it) — just says that GPLv2 is better when asked about the new license. It’s a good read, and I would suggest leaving here and going to the interview here.

(Larry Cafiero, editor/publisher of Open Source Reporter, is an associate member of the Free Software Foundation.)